Dorothy Scarborough

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Dorothy Scarborough
Born January 27, 1878(1878-01-27)
Mount Carmel, Texas
Died November 7, 1935 (aged 57)
New York City, New York
Occupation Writer, professor and literary critic
Literary movement American folklore
Notable work(s) The Wind
Influences
Influenced

Dorothy Scarborough (born Emily Dorothy Scarborough, January 27, 1878 - died November 7, 1935) was an American writer who wrote about Texas, folk culture, cotton farming, ghost stories and a woman's life in the Midwest.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Scarborough was born in Mount Carmel, Texas. At the age of four she moved to Sweetwater, Texas for her mother's health, as her mother needed the drier climate. The family soon left Sweetwater in 1887, so that the Scarborough children could get a good education at Baylor College.

[edit] Academics and Writing

Even though Scarborough's writings are identified with Texas, she studied at University of Chicago and Oxford University and beginning in 1916 taught literature at Columbia University.

While receiving her PhD from Columbia, she wrote a dissertation, "The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917)". Sylvia Ann Grider writes in a critical introduction [1] the dissertation "was so widely acclaimed by her professors and colleagues that it was published and it has become a basic reference work."

Dorothy Scarborough came in contact with many writers in New York, including Edna Ferber and Vachel Lindsey. She taught creative writing classes at Columbia. Among her creative writing students were Eric Walrond, and Carson McCullers, who took her first college writing class from Scarborough.[1]

Her most critically acclaimed book, The Wind was later made into a film of the same name, starring Lilian Gish.

[edit] Original works

  • Fugitive Verses (1912), original verses
  • Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917); available in its entirety at Google Book Search
  • From a Southern Porch (1919), viewable in full at Google Book Search or viewable at the Portal to Texas History
  • Humorous Ghost Stories (1921) edited
  • In the Land of Cotton (1923)
  • On the Trail of Negro Folksongs (1925)
  • The Wind (1925), considered her most acclaimed work.
  • The Unfair Sex (serialized, 1925-26)
  • Impatient Griselda (1927)
  • Can't Get a Redbird (1929)
  • Stretch-Berry Smile (1932)
  • The Story of Cotton (1933) juvenile reader
  • Selected Short Stories of Today (1935)
  • A Song Catcher in the Southern Mountains (1937, posthumous)

Works by Dorothy Scarborough at Project Gutenberg:

[edit] Biographical/critical essays

Biographical Essay on the Handbook of Texas Online Foreword to The Wind by Sylvia Ann Grider, Barker Texas History Center series, University of Texas Press, 1979.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ a b Foreword to The Wind by Sylvia Ann Grider, Barker Texas History Center series, University of Texas Press, 1979.

[edit] References

Dorothy Scarborough from the Handbook of Texas Online